Mailinglist Archive: opensuse (2114 mails)

Re: [opensuse] Questions for Partitioning guru's

From:
Felix Miata <mrmazda@xxxxxx>

Date:
Sat, 08 Sep 2007 01:15:42 -0400

Message-id:
<46E22FFE.2040002@xxxxxx>

On 2007/09/08 00:49 (GMT-0400) Bob S apparently typed:

> A while back I purchased a 250 GB Sata drive, intending to install different
> os's and or versions of SuSE. I installed 10.2 on my shiny new drive but I
> stupidly partitioned 3 primaries, /, /swap, and /home, and used the fourth
> primary for the extended partition. Dumb move - Out of partitions with about
> 150GB of free space. (I run 10.0 on another small IDE drive)

Not exactly dumb. Without "sacrificing" a primary for use as an extended,
you're limited to 4 partitions total. There are only two ways to be out of
available unpartitioned space to add a logical if an extended already exists:

1-100% of freespace is already allocated to partitions
2-all existing freespace is located in between two primary partitions neither
of which is an extended partition

If the latter is your problem, all primaries need to be made adjacent.

> Is the /home as safe residing in the extended partition?

The difference between logical and primary partitions only matters to boot
loaders and legacy DOS and windoz operating systems. Linux once booted sees
partitions as partitions without distinction between logical & primary, which
means there's no difference in "safety", whatever that means.

> I could never delete
> or change the extended partition because they would wipe out /home - right?

The "extended partition" is nothing but a series of marker sectors pointing
to partitions that don't have table entries in the MBR, plus a primary
partition table entry that starts the marker chain by pointing to the first
logical partition.

> Is it a good idea to have /swap on the extended partition?

Linux doesn't care. Generally the best place for swap is wherever your disk's
fastest access exists, usually but not always at or near the "front".

> Do you use the
> same /swap for all of the os's? (e.g. like my /swap for 10.0 on the IDE
> drive?)

Linux installers generally will use every swap partition they can find. If
you have multiple swap partitions, you'll have to manually change each new
fstab to use whichever swap partitions you want used for that Linux.

> How do you manage to run 3 or 4 os variants on just 4 primary partitions?

I doubt anyone does. There's no reason to. I usually have a maintenance
and/or boot partition on the first, a boot manager on the second, a small
primary type 0x06 for DOS and/or windoz, and everything else as logicals,
typically more than 20 total per disk.

On partitioning generally: http://mrmazda.no-ip.com/partitioningindex.html
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